The Wreck of the Emerald Sky – new novella in The Colored Lens

~ Sean Monaghan ~ Leave a comment

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My novella The Wreck of The Emerald Sky has just been published in The Colored Lens.

Filled with bright, imaginative speculative fiction, The Colored Lens is a quarterly, available on Kindle for $2.99.

The Wreck of the Emerald Sky is a sci-fi adventure story set in my Barris Space universe. If you’ve read my stories “Barris Debris” in Deep Space Terror or “Eltanin Hoop Anomaly Rescue” in Will It Go Faster If I Push This?, then you might be familiar with the setting.

Here are the first couple of paragraphs as a taster
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Chapter one

Derel Larsen sat bolt upright in the bed as his ear-roll chimed. He was halfway to Meriam’s room before he realized that the chime wasn’t her security alert. It was just a phone call.
“Larsen,” he said, thumbing the connect. He kept going towards Meriam’s door.
“Larsen?” a voice said. One of the controllers at flight. Jamie, Larsen thought. Nice woman, even if she did have to confirm his name right after he’d said it.
“Medical leave is over, sport,” Jamie said.

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Prometheus – a positive view

~ Sean Monaghan ~ 1 Comment

Seems lots of people didn’t like the movie Prometheus. Well, I loved it. Start to finish. Sure there are issues… show me a movie that doesn’t have the odd glitch, or more than the odd glitch. What I loved is the spectacle and the attention to rising action. The pace is elegant. We’re given hooks, a little bit of conflict, some scene setting, a little more conflict, and more and more action. I’m not sure why so many of the reviews seem to have the thought that “it’s not as good as Alien“. To my mind it’s a different movie, in the way that Aliens is different to Alien: related but standing on its own feet. Granted Aliens was always a direct sequel, but they’re different movies. I guess Scott has a lot to live up to in that he directed Alien, but he’s changed as a film-maker and made a film that follows a different path (though at times almost the same path), and is fun to watch, especially in terms of its spectacle and story-telling. If you haven’t seen it, go see it. You might love it, you might hate it, but doesn’t that go for lots of things?

On writing less than 1000 words a day.

~ Sean Monaghan ~ 1 Comment

For the last five and a bit months (that is, since January 1st) I’ve written at least 1000 words a day. Some days have been just over that target – 1015, 1085 – other days have been up in the multiple thousands (two days of 5500 words). I’ve written two novels, two novellas and numerous short stories. (The total word count is 244,000). It’s been a revelation to me to be able to work so intensely and so focused for this period.

And now it will hit it’s first speed bump. My target for the year is 300,000 words and it seems that now I’ll likely reach and exceed that. Why just 300,000? Well, I still earn a living at a full-time job. And I moonlight too, tutoring in a creative writing course. Fitting the writing in around the course was always part of the plan, though the structure of the course altered since I first set the 300K goal. Today is the first major deadline and I’m about to plunge into three weeks of concentrated effort in giving feedback to dozens of students.

Writing my own stuff will take a sideline. Today will be my first day this year of writing under 1000 words. I feel like I’m a little in mourning.

Still, I have two stories open at the moment, and I know where they’re both going. I’m itching to get to them, so that’s going to help me feel intentional with my marking. And I learn so much from the marking process too that it’s all only going to be good for my writing.

Taking your own best advice

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I read a great post on writing by Rachel Aaron recently – how she focuses her writing time to get concentrated results with a mix of tracking her productivity (word counts), knowing what she’s writing and writing enthusiastically – read the post if you’re a writer, it makes for interesting stuff. I’m partway through the first of Rachel’s Eli novels – The Spirit Thief – and enjoying it.

Rachel also has a post about her thoughts the Taleist survey of self-published authors. Her post was interesting, and for a moment I almost considered buying the survey to get a sense of my own efforts – after all this is a business and the survey only costs $5. Except then I read Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s “Not a real survey” post on the Taleist document, and then the comments following that. Well – completely the opposite take. I’d had a sneaking suspicion that the survey might not be quite up to par, and her overview (and the comments) breaks it down neatly. Too many holes. Still, sometimes you’ve got to dig through a lot of dirt to find any gold.

On hitting the mark

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May turned into my slowest month for the year – just creeping over the 40,000 word mark. A pretty busy time with tutoring kind of kept the lid on a little – in a good way: it’s useful to other things to focus on. I’ve sent off three contest entries, and some new magazine submissions, as well as resubmitting some stories that had been rejected elsewhere. My novella “The Wreck of the Emerald Sky” comes out in June in The Colored Lens, so that’s good news. June is going to be a much slower month, though, as tutoring really ramps up. I’m hoping to hit 15,000 words, which, while many fewer than any other month this year, will take me neatly to a quarter million words. I’ll post soon about some lessons I think I’m learning here as I aim for 300,000 words for the year (yes, I’m ahead of target – that’s one of the lessons).

One day: three rejections

~ Sean Monaghan ~ 2 Comments

So while I’m busy writing (I’ve finished up the second novel, and completed a long short-story since I last posted), and tutoring (whew, almost at the end of round four) and, well, just life in general… I’m also busy submitting stories to magazines. Great news – I’ve had an acceptance (a sci-fi novella, coming out soon… more details on that to come). Yay.

Today, though, was one of those “oh, well” days. Three rejection letters. All form letters too. Along the lines of “Thank you for submitting but we regret that we cannot use your story at this time”. You know the kind of thing. So, I found some other magazines with current open submissions and sent those three off right away. Just because some editor doesn’t have space for my best, second best and third best stories, doesn’t mean someone else won’t.

Now, back to finishing up this last bit of tutoring, and writing the next story.

Disappearing posts… why did this vanish for a week?

~ Sean Monaghan ~ 1 Comment

Word count goal edging up – closing on 200,000
Posted on April 30, 2012 by Sean Monaghan
As April draws to a close, I’m closing on 200,000 words for the year. It would have been kind of neat to have made it – a tidy kind of 50,000 word average per month – but I’m still way ahead of where I’d expected to be… considering the aim was for 300,000 for the whole year. The total is 195,000 and change right now. I’m also well into the goal of what I would be writing: one novel completed (and published), a short novel completed (likewise, published – under a pen name), and several stories completed and out with various publishers. Right now I’m nearing the end of the second novel (this one a literary novel which I will be sending to agents). That’s got about another seven to ten thousand words to go, then I’ll be on to another SF story and a new young adult novel for one of my pen names. May will be a slower month with a heap of marking to do, but so far I’m pleased with the year.

Addendum: I know what I did wrong. I finally figured out how to change the url of the blog. I did that on the desktop. But, when posting from the Android tablet, that poor little machine was still looking for the old url to post to… so it recreated it and made the old url live again. The post was there the whole time for anyone to read.

The Tunnel – preview experiment

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Just trying a little experiment with ways of letting my novel The Tunnel be out in the world. Issuu is a cool way of publishing documents. Magazines seem to favour it, but then I discovered that I could publish an excerpt from my novel in a relatively straightforward way. So with a click here you can read the first 18 chapters free. Yes, this is slightly stolen from James Patterson, but I’m still learning about marketing and so forth.

At the page there’s a link to buy a print version for $11.09. I don’t know what that’s about (you can buy a print version of the whole book – 100 chapters – for $14.00 from Amazon… why buy just a segment?). Still I hope you enjoy reading a few chapters of it this way.